18

Meme

Limor Shifman

Once upon a time there was a term. Its name was meme. The proud father, Richard Dawkins, showered attention on it while others ridiculed and dismissed it. Then along came the internet, whose users crowned the meme with such popularity, the term almost ran away with them.

The following essay unpacks this simplistic and suggestive fairytale. While Meme remains a troublemaker among other titanic digital keywords (see community, culture, digital, internet), it is a concept worth deciphering. This term encapsulates more than popular fads such as Gangnam Style, Lolcats, or the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge; it is a crucial conceptual and empirical tool for understanding how digital culture works. Rehearsing Raymond Williams’s notion that keywords capture activities and their interpretation as well as certain forms of thought, I claim that memes—or, more precisely, their recent incarnation as internet memes—are pivotal for understanding both digital behaviors and the cultural logics governing them.

Memes in the Predigital Era

The term meme, unlike many other keywords, can be given a fairly precise birthdate: Richard Dawkins coined it in chapter 11 of his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Whereas the book as a whole is about evolutionary biology, chapter 11 is dedicated to human culture (and its analogy to the world of gene-based replication). Dawkins observes that humans have devised small cultural units of transmission that, like genes, spread from person to person through imitation. These units—which evolve and propagate much faster than genes do—follow the same basic principles of variation, competition, selection, and retention; examples include texts (e.g., “Happy Birthday” or “Humpty Dumpty”), ideas (e.g., evolution or heaven), and behaviors (e.g., the miniskirt fashion or blowing out candles on a birthday cake). Dawkins called these units memes—a term he derives by shortening the Greek root mimeme (“something which is imitated”) to nearly rhyme with gene. In addition, he draws out the affinity between meme and the French word même (“same”), as well as its resemblance to memory as a source of inspiration (see memory). Interestingly, the Greek root mneme (“memory”) was already being used in the nineteenth century by Austrian sociologist Ewald Hering to discuss cultural evolution. It was further developed by German biologist Richard Semonasa and even adopted as the title of his 1904 book, Die Mneme. When he coined the term, Dawkins was unaware of these earlier uses; his fresh appeal to an ancient root came to practice what it preached: it too became a successful meme.

But it took some time. The emergence of memetics—“the theoretical and empirical science that studies the replication, spread and evolution of memes” (Heylighen and Chielens 2009)—was slow and not without obstacles. Its spread took place in part thanks to the contribution of prominent scholars Douglas Hofstadter (1985) and Daniel C. Dennett (1990, 1995), a short-lived Journal of Memetics (1997–2005), and several related books around the turn of the millennium (Blackmore 1999; Distin 2005; Lynch 1996). These “meme enthusiasts” soon met with fierce opposition, however. A main criticism related to the concept’s ambiguity: even today, debate rages over what precisely a meme is. According to Dawkins’s initial definition, memes can be ideas, practices, or texts. However, this broad scope complicates attempts at quantifying and tracking memes’ propagation: few can agree on what exactly should be measured. Others have criticized the analogy between culture and nature, and between human behavior and genes in specific, as reductive, materialistic, and insufficient for describing complex human behaviors. A third point of criticism related to the notion that humans are “controlled” by memes. This idea, foregrounded in prominent works such as Blackmore’s best seller, The Meme Machine, generated resentment and debate over the diminished role of human agency in memetic diffusion. Finally, as the millennium came to a close, some critics claimed that memetics, or the study of memes, has no added value: it does not offer tools or insights beyond anything already in use by cultural anthropologists and linguists (Rose 1998; Chesterman 2005).

Enter: The Internet

While researchers continue arguing about the usefulness of this construct, netizens have delivered their verdict. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the term meme had become an integral part of online vernacular. The concept is now used casually and ubiquitously, mostly to signal the rapid propagation of images, videos, and catchphrases on the internet (Knobel and Lankshear 2007). Within a short period, two significant changes occurred: meme often signified not a general unit of culture but a digital one, and it moved from the realm of academia (and popular science) to the public sphere (and popular culture). As its own evolutionary logic suggests that a meme succeeds when certain social, cultural, psychological, and technological conditions expedite its uptake, we need ask which factors facilitated memes’ memetic success in the third millennium. In what follows, I highlight four such factors—(1) scale, (2) transformation, (3) transparency, and (4) structure. Each of the factors relates not only to technological affordances, but also to the nesting of these affordences in “meme nurtering” social and cultural norms.

Scale. Dawkins’s initial framing highlighted three qualities that enhanced memes’ success: longevity (survival over time), fecundity (the number of copies produced within a time unit), and copying fidelity (accuracy). As early commentators noted (Marshall 1998), the internet has boosted all three: digital video meme transmission has much higher copying fidelity than oral or print communication; the internet facilitates the rapid diffusion of any given message to numerous recipients; and longevity can also potentially be enhanced, owing to augmented storage possibilities. Put simply, the internet affords broad, quick, and accurate meme propagation.

Transformation. Digital media transform content fairly easily. They offer tools and technologies for imitation and remixing media content. Instead of memorizing long oral epic poems, users are mimicking and remixing digital content, Photoshopping images, or layering in sound tracks, with a few finger clicks. Internet memes evolve and mutate with profound ease thanks to the transformative power of digital tools. As detailed below, this expedited mutation rate may require an amended definition of memes, which will take into account their growing variability in the digital age.

Transparency. Memes not only propagate more quickly and with greater variation on the internet; their transformation may also be, under certain conditions, more transparent. Most popular platforms and applications let lay users access and publicly display metadata about viewing preferences, choices, and user responses in the aggregate. Visible metadata—the number of views, comments, or likes—in turn becomes part of the ratcheting-up process of memetic propagation, where the popular memes become more popular. At the same time, many mechanisms of meme transmission are concealed, leading to powerful modes for hidden network gatekeeping and user surveillance (Nahon and Hemsley 2013).

Structure. Finally, the internet in general, and Web 2.0 in particular, embodies a structural logic congruent with meme diffusion. While memes are passed along from person to person, they gradually scale to constitute shared social phenomena. They spread on a micro basis, but impact the mezzo and sometimes even the macro levels of societies, shaping mind-sets and actions. In the so-called Web 2.0, or participatory culture era, we see the convergence of memes with the notion that bottom-up user-generated modes of transmission have transformative power. Applications such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube not only facilitate the diffusion of such content but also incorporate a normative imperative that values “sharing” (John 2013; see also sharing). Sharing content—or spreading memes—has recently become a governing logic, part and parcel of the participatory zeitgeist. To paraphrase Ethan Zuckerman (2008), the internet is not made of cats; it is made of memes.

From Memes to Internet Memes

So far, I have described memes’ compatibility with digital culture. Yet the internet has also dramatically altered memes’ modes of circulation. In a recent talk, while noting the broad continuities between viral content and memes offline and online, Richard Dawkins claimed that internet users have “hijacked” his original idea: while according to his theory memes mutated by random change, now they are altered deliberately by creative individuals (and resourceful marketers in search of hits).¹ The result, whether we are critical of it or not, allows us to reconceptualize the active role individuals play in creating, spreading, and experiencing memes; It also requires an updated definition of the concept, or, to be more precise, it calls for the Internet meme to be defined.

Early accounts of internet memes tended to associate them with humor. For example, Christian Bauckhage (2011) claimed that memes “are inside jokes or pieces of hip underground knowledge that many people are in on”; and Patrick Davison (2012) noted that “an Internet meme is a piece of culture, typically a joke, which gains influence through online transmission.” Yet as the term appeared more frequently in public spheres—and as it was invoked as part of political and activist agendas (Bennett and Segerberg 2012; Milner 2013)—its automatic association with humorous communication diminished, opening the way for alternative definitions.

Elsewhere I have suggested that the definition of internet memes should entail a shift from singular to plural. Instead of depicting the meme as a single cultural unit that has propagated vigorously, internet memes should be defined as groups of content units, or as textual families (Shifman 2013). This shift derives from the new ways in which memes are experienced in the digital age. In the past, individuals were likely to be exposed to one meme version at a given time (for instance, they heard a nursery rhyme and only much later encountered a different version of it). In contrast, in digital environments people experience memes as boundless groups of interconnected texts, images, and videos, separated by nothing more than mouse clicks. Increasingly, people are exposed to memetic multiples and variation, as successful internet memes tend to incorporate numerous visible versions.

Accordingly I suggest defining an internet meme as follows:

(a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, or stance, which (b) were created with awareness of each other, and (c) were circulated, imitated, and transformed via the internet by many users. (Shifman 2013)

More than a transition from singular to plural, this definition also incorporates the idea that internet memes may entail several memetic dimensions—namely, several aspects that people may imitate. In some memes the binding quality may be a certain type of content (the idea of a cute cat); in others, the imitated element will be a format (a photo with a caption) or a specific stance or position taken by its users (playful, humorous communication). Many memes entail a combination of at least two of these three memetic dimensions.

This suggested definition also highlights the main feature differentiating internet memes from their close relatives, “viral” content. If memes are based on variability between texts, the term viral mostly signifies the quick and vast propagation of a specific text, video, or image (Nahon and Hemsley 2013). In other words: while we can think of the viral as a singularity that is circulated without significant alterations (for example, the clip Gangnam Style), memes are all about mutation—people’s creative reactions to former versions (in this case: the vast body of reactions and remakes that the Gangnam Style video provoked). However, the distinction between memes and virals is fuzzy. “Purely” viral content probably does not exist, since once a photo, or a video, becomes sufficiently popular online, some user, somewhere, will surely do something with it. Similarly, purely memetic content, no matter how unpopular, must involve some degree of cultural contagion or spreading to be considered memetic. Responding to the growing use of memes and virals, Henry Jenkins and his colleagues (2013) suggest jettisoning both terms and their biological baggage for what they call “spreadable media.” While the clarity and sensibility of this concept is appealing, I contend that the rootedness of both memes and virality in contemporary digital discourse requires careful rearticulation rather than replacement of these keywords.

Internet Memes between Ritual and Transmission

Memes have come full circle, from academia to the popular domain and back. In the last decade, internet memes have begun feeding an expanding field of study (Burgess 2008; Gal, Shifman, and Kampf 2015; Knobel and Lankshear 2007; Milner 2012; Miltner 2014; Segev et al. 2015).² By way of conclusion, I wish to highlight the ways in which meme studies may employ and bridge James Carey’s (1989) classic differentiation between transmission and ritual models of communication. “Transmission” likens the spread of information through media to the movement of peoples or goods, and asserts that communication is mainly about increasing messages’ spread and effect as they travel in space. Contrarily, the “ritual” model looks at communication as a shared action—a choreographed construction of communities through shared symbols and practice.

Both approaches seem highly relevant to our understanding of internet memes. In fact, it is impossible to understand memes without amalgamating the two. Since memetic diffusion is based on gradual propagation, the transmission and movement of memes is obviously essential; at the same time, this constant and seemingly chaotic movement of items has a larger social purpose, which often includes community building and reparation (Gal, Shifman, and Kampf 2015; Milner 2012; Miltner 2014). Such meme-based communities are vivid illustrations of the “networked self” (Papacharissi 2010) who, on the one hand, strives to express individuality and creativity (through the articulation of his/her own unique meme version) and, on the other, longs for communality (constructed through the shared referencing of the recurring unit). This intersection of the transmission and the ritual models—which requires the simulations investigation of how and why memes propagate and mutate—outlines a worthy agenda for internet memes studies likely to endure for years to come.

See in this volume: community, culture, digital, internet, memory, sharing

See in Williams: aesthetic, art, behavior, collective, creative, ecology, evolution, generation, genetic, image, mechanical, nature, organic, popular, sociology, structure

Notes

1Available at http://www.webcitation.org/6HzDGE9Go.

2Yet memes continue to be an integral part of internet users’ mundane vocabulary. A comparison between the academic database Web of Science and Google Trends reveals a striking correspondence between scientific and popular accounts of the term meme, characterized by a sharp rise in the concept’s use since 2010.

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